Masculinity in the Philippines Essay

In the imperial age, the host shaped parlia givetary law to suit its peculiar needs. Modem armies are complex, costly institutions that must ramify astray to mobilize the vast human and material resources their operations require. Since the armed forces demand the absolute regard and, at times, the lives of universal manfuls, the state often forms, or reforms, societys culture and ideology to make s anileiery dish a moral imperative. In the cultural encounter that was empire, compound armies professionalved as amazingly potent agents of social change, introducing a major Western institution, with imbedded values, in a forceful, al close irresistible, manner. As powerful, intrusive institutions, modem armies trans organize cultures and shaped grammatical gender identities, fostering elaborateness and stunt womanry whose influence has persisted long by and by colonial rule.Above all, these armies, colonial and national, propagated a culture, nay a cult of masculinity. Rece nt historical research has explored the shipway that revolt European states reconstructed gender roles to support legions mobilization. To name males for multitude re maturement, European nations constructed a stereotype of men as courageous and women as affirming, worthy prizes of manly males. In its genius, the modem state- by its powerful propaganda tools of education, literature, and media-appropriated the near-universal folk ritual of male initiation to make troops service synonymous with the passage to human worlds.Not hardly did mass conscription produce soldiers, it all overly shaped gender roles in the whole of society. Modern warfare, as it developed in Europe, was the mother of a overbold masculinity propagated globally in an age of empire through colonial armies, boys schools, and y tabuh movements. As a colony of Spain and America, the Philippines felt these global cultural currents and provides an knowing terrain for exploration of thismilitarized masculin ity. Like the other colonial states of Asia and Africa, both powers controlled their Philippine colony with native troops led by European officeholders, an implicit deprecation of the manliness of elite Philippine males.For the all-male electorate of the American era, Filipino nationahm thus came to mean not precisely independence but, of equal importance, liberation from colonial emasculation. Over time, a cultural dialectic of the colonial and national produced a synthesis with symbol and social roles marked by an extreme gender dimorphism. When Filipino leaders in the long run began building a national army in the 1930s, they borrowed the European standard of phalanx masculinity with all its inbuilt biases. By exempting women from conscription and barring them from array officers training at the Philippine host Academy, the acres exaggerated the societys male/female polarities.Once set in 1936, these military regulations and their social influence would prove surprisin gly persistent and pervasive. It would be n advance(prenominal) thirty long time until the armed forces recruited their first women soldiers in 1963 and another thirty long time after that so onenessr the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) admitted its first female cadets in 1993 (Hilsdon 1995, 48, 51, 89 Duque 1981, vii). If we accept what unrivaled historian has called the emancipated status of Filipino women in the 19th century, so the prewar nationalist movement, with its rhetoric of militarism and male empowerment, may get hold of skewed the gender balance within the Philippinepolity. In a Malay society with a legacy of gender equality-bilateral kinship, matrilocal marriage, and gender-neutral pronouns-this aspect of nationalism seems socially retrogressive.Understandably, postwar historians have overlooked this glorification of masculinity and military valor in their sympathetic studies of prewar Filipino nationalism. N anetheless, mass conscription shaped gender roles in t he first half of the 20th century and fostered a rhetoric that pervaded Philippine politics in its second half. In deploying Europes cult of masculinity to support mass conscription, the rural area introduced a advanced element into the landed estates political culture. Indeed, this engendered social order-propagated through conscription, education, and mass media-fostered imagery that would shape Philippine politics at key transitional moments in the latter decades of the 20th century. For well over half the fifty plus eld since independence, the Philippines has been ruled by death chairs who won office with claims of martial valor and then governed in a military manner.COMMONWEALTH A N D MASCULINITYThe Philippine acceptance of this Euro-American model of masculinity provides strong evidence of the figure of speechs power. The successful imposition of this Westernized masculinity, with its extreme gender dimorphism, upon a Malay society with a long history of more balanced rol es, makes the Philippines a telltale(a) instance of this global process. Within twenty years, the span of a single generation, mobilization and its propaganda, convinced a people without a tradition of military service to accept conscription and internalize a sassy standard 1 of manhood. When tested in battle during World struggle 1, the generation of Filipino officers organise in this mobilization proved willing to fight and die with exceptional courage.Models of MasculinityDuring the deuce decades of this rattling(prenominal) social experiment, prewar Philippine institutions use two complementary cultural devices to indoctrinate the two-year-old into a new gender identity a mass propaganda of gender dimorphism and a militarized form of male initiation. Among the more schools that participated in this experiment, t w v t h e University of thePhilippines (UP) and, a decade later, the Philippine Military Academy (PMA)-would play a central role as cultural mediators in construc ting this new national standard for manhood. To translate a foreign masculine form into a Filipino cultural idiom, the cadet army corps at UP and the PMA appropriated local traditions of male initiation, using them as a powerfully effective indoctrination into modem military service. Scholars of the Philippine military have often noted how the ordeal of the first or plebe year serves to bind the PMAs calibrates into a manakin or batch with an extraordinary solidarity.The half-dozen doctoral dissertations on the Philippine military argue, in the words of a Chicago psychologist who observed the PMA in the mid-1960 that cadets form deportmenttime bonds. . . in the crucible of the hazing proess. What is the meaning of this ritual with its extreme violence? Hazing, seemingly a small issue, has embedded within it larger problems of masculinity central to armies e trulywhere. In fieldwork around the world, anthropologists have discovered the near universality of male i n i t i a t i n Around the globe and across time, many societies view . manhood as something that must be earned and thus create rituals totest and train their teenage males.Observing these rituals in the remote Highlands of Papua-New Guinea, anthropologist Roger Keesing offers a single, succinct explanation for the prevalence of harsh male initiation warfare (Keesing 1982,32-34 Herdt 1982,5741). Similarly, at the m a r p s of the modem Philippine state, young men have long been initiated into manhood through ritual testing of their martial valor. In the 20th century, Muslim groups in the south have formed all-male minimal alliance groups to engage in ritualized warfare, while the Ilongot highlanders of northern Luzon require boys to pass severe tests of manhood by taking at least one head in combat (Kiefer 1972 Rosaldo 1980, 13940). From an anthropological perspective, hazing becomes the central rite in a passage from boyhood to manhood, civilian to soldier. Filipino plebe and New Guinea adolesce nt pass through similar initiations to emerge as warriors hardened for battle and bound together for defense of their communities (Gennep 1960, vii, 11).Recent historical research has explored the ways that rising European states reconstructed gender roles to support mobilization of modern armies. By marrying anthropologists universals to the historians time-bounded specifics, we can see how European nation-states, by making military service an initiation ritual, primed their males for mass slaughter on the modem battlefield. later Britains dismal performance in the Crimean War of the 1850s, headmasters at its elite human beings schools began hardening boys for future(a) day command through pastimes. Indeed, Harrows head proclaimed that the esprit de corps, which merit success in cricket or football, are the very qualities which win the day in . . . war. A half-century later in South Africa, British troops faced difficulties subduing Boer farmers, raising questions about the mi litary fitness of ordinary Englishmen.Responding to this perceived crisis, Lord Baden-Powell organized the Boy Scouts in 1908 to pass as many boys through our instance factory as we possibly can ( bitgan 1987, 150-53 1981,2241 1986, 33-36 Rosenthal 1986, 1-6). In his study of the cult of war in nineteenth-century Europe, historian George Mosse asks Why did young men in great numbers mess to the colors, eager to face dying and acquit themselves in battle? Simply gear up, they volunteered because the modern nation-state, through its poets and propagandists, made the passage to manhood synonymous with military service. To become a man in Victorias England or Bismarcks Germany, a young male had to serve.In the first months of World War I, this cult of war achieved a virtual florescenceas young idealists hurled themselves into the slaughter. After 145,000 German soldiers died at Langemarck in 1914, one poet wrote Here I stand, proud and all alone, ecstatic that I have become a man. R ecalling this battle in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler said Seventeen year old boys now looked like men. Similarly, during World War 11, U.S. army researchers anchor that American soldiers fought hard to avoid being branded a woman, a dangerous threat to the contemporary male personality (Mosse 1990, 15, 72 Stouffer, et al. 1949, 131-32). Not only did mass conscription produce soldiers, it in like manner shaped gender roles in the wider society. To prepare every male for military service, European nations constructed a stereotype of men ascourageous, honorable, and physically formed on borrowed Greek standards of male beauty. By the 1920s, women were, through this century-long process, transformed into static immutable symbols in order to command the vigilance of truly masculine men.I4Rhetoric of Colonial MasculinityAlthough the American colonial regime eventually played a central role in the brass of a Filipino officer corps, the US Army was initially hostile to the idea. During its first decade in the islands, the US Army was absorbed in a massive counterinsurgency campaign, and, like colonial armies elsewhere, denigrated the masculinity of its subject society. In little more than two years after their landing in 1898, the U.S. Army learned the same colonial lessons that the British and Dutch had distilled from two centuries of using native troops in India and Indonesia. Asian soldiers were, from an imperial point of view, welladapted to withstand the rigors of service in their own state of matter.But only a European had the character required of an officer. As the editor of Englands Statesman wrote in 1885, educated Indians were lacking in the courageous and manly behavior to which we justly attach so high an importance in the culture of our own youth. Colonials often found ascendant lowland groups both effeminate and insubordinate. But certain martial racesn- much(prenominal) as the Gurkhas, Ambonese, or Karens-were thought capable of great courage under fire and rumbustious loyalty to their white officers5 In effect, there was an imperial consensus that certain native troops, when drilled and disciplined by European officers of good character, made ideal colonial forces.From the outset, the American commander in the islands, world-wide Elwell S. Otis, felt, like most Americans of his day, that elite Filipinos were unfit for command. In an essay for a U.S. military journal in 1900, one American officer dismissed the typical officer in General Emilio Aguinaldos revolutionary army as a half-breed, a small dealer, a hanger-on of the Spaniards. Thus, when the US Army formed its colonial forces, the Philippine Scouts, the soldiers would all be Filipinos, but their officerswere to be white Americans engageed from the line of the Regular Army (Woolard 1975, 13, 225 Franklin 1935).In sum, Americas high colonial rhetoric celebrated the special bond between American officers and their Filipino troops, and, by implication, denigrated elit e Filipino character and capacity for command. Writing from retirement at the end of the US rule, one American veteran, Constabulary Captain Harold H. Elarth, offered a succinct version of this rhetoric. By funfair dealing, unusual sagacity and confirmed courage, young American officers, pacified and controlled tribes that for 300 years had continuously warred with the Spaniards. This success, he explained, came from the psychology of the Malay which inspired Filipino soldiers to follow their American lieutenants with adoration (Hurley 1938, 298-99 Elarth 1949, 14-15).Nationalist ResponseIn the early years of American rule, Filipino nationalists rejected this emasculating colonial rhetoric and made the training of native officers a central plank in their campaign for independence. By demanding officer training, the all-male nationalist movement challenged colonial assumptions that native men were, by racial character, unsuited for command. In the political rhetoric of the day, mili tary drill would advance the nationalist cause by training officers for a future army and hardening the fiber of the countrys youth. To assert their manhood, nationalist leaders seized upon any pretext for military drill, even service under the colonial flag. Only a few years after the Philippine-American War, certain colonials and nationalists began to cooperate in building a Filipino officer corps. In 1907, the fledgling Constabulary School at manila gradational its first Filipino officers from a short, three-month training course and then moved to permanent quarters in the mountain city ofBaguio for a more mingy six-month curriculum.A year later, the U.S. Congress authorized the admission of Filipinos to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In 1914, the h s t Filipino cadet, Vicente P. Lim, graduated with an academic rank of seventy-seven among 107 cadets-an event of suchsignificance that the Philippine Resident Commissioner, Manuel Quezon, made a special trip from upper- case letter, DC.6 When America entered World War I, the Philippine Legislature voted consumingly to raise a Philippine National Guard division and Senate President Quezon crossed the Pacific to lobby personally for Washingtons authorization. Even the War segments determined effort to block its mobilization until 11 November 1918, the very last day of war, could not intermit the Filipino enthusiasm for military service. Over 28,000 men volunteered.With bands playing and banners flying, the Philippine National Guard drilled for three months until it was disbanded in February 1919 (Woolard 1975, 170-84, 196). During the 1920s, the American colonial regime, in fundamental change of policy, began training Filipinos for command. After taking office as governor-general in 1921, General Leonard Wood, a career officer, mobilized the resources of the US Army to open officer training programs (Hayden 1955, 734-35). To train a first generation of Filipino officers, the US Army loaned instruc tors, rifles, and bayonets to the newly-formed military science departments at Manilas colleges and universities. Along with the weapons, these programs also borrowed an American model of the military male. Though the program spread to many schools, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at the University of the Philippines (UP) remained, for over a decade, the largest and most influential.UP Cadet CorpsDrill began at UP in 1922 when its Regents funded a Department of Military Science and Tactics, retained an active-duty U.S. Army captain as its chairman, and authorized an armory. Five years later, UP President Rafael Palma, a prominent nationalist, praised the Department for establishing the nucleus of a future national military organization (Panis 1925, 14-15 Palma 1924 Peiia 1953, 1-2). As Palma predicted, the ROTC program grew rapidly, adding field artillery in 1929 and machine guns six years later. After passage of the National Defense Act in 1935, the university acquired an other 2,000 capital of Illinois rifles and doubled its cadet corps to 3,304 trainee officers by 1938.Beyond drill and marksmanship, the program indoctrinated its cadets into nationalism. We need to make . . . our youth . . . so proud of their race and their democracy that they will die fighting for it, President Quezon told the UP cadets in 1937. We have all been trained, wrote the Corps cadet colonel a year later, with patriotism ever so guardedly engraved in our hearts by our military instructors, we are proud to say, as they would have us say, w e are ready.07 Other Manila universities followed these leads. While the habituallyfunded UP had the largest cadet program, the elite, Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila was proud home to the countrys top drill corps. The 1923 Manila Carnival featured a drill competition by cadets from San Beda, the National University, and, of course, Ateneo and the UP. Along with basketball and baseball, close-order drill contests would remain a high point o f inter-collegiate competition until the war.These promenades, featuring what one UP cadet called thousands of powerful young bloodsrifles on their shoulders, gallantly marching to the time of their music, drew large crowds and sparked school p i r i t . By the early 1930s, a decade of reserve-officer training had encouraged an ideal of military masculinity among cadets at Manilas universities. At the UP, trainee officers articulated an ideology that equated masculine qualification with national defense. A nation stands or falls, succeeds or fails, just in proportion to the . . . manliness of each succeeding generation, wrote a cadet in the 1931 annual (Viardo 1931, 381). Cadet sergeant Fred Ruiz Castro, a future Supreme Court chief justice, explained that military training helps engender the proper citizenshipu-notably romanceesy to all especially to the old and to the weaker sex.In the 1935 UP yearbook, Castro and his comrade Macario Peralta, Jr., a future defense secretary , co-authored an essay arguing that drill molded the masculine virtues necessary to build the nation From the Corps, graduate men steeped in patriotism . . . men who know their duties both to country and to God . . . men who are sound thinkers, strong hearted These are the men the country needs to cope with new problems (Castro and Peralta, Jr. 1935, 345). Reinforcing this gender dimorphism, UPS all-male cadet companies debar women from drill but recruited them as sponsors to appear in white-tie, frilly gowns at full-dress parades. Illustrative of this imbalance, in thelate 1920s one of these sponsors gave the Corps a colorful oration titled The Woman Behind the Man Behind the Gun (Castro 1932 355 Quirino 1930, 427). By 1936, the UP cadets had expanded their Corps of Sponsors toforty coeds such as Miss Eva Estrada, the muse of the Second Artillery Battalion and a future senator. On National Heroes Day, the UP cadets gunpoint a mock battle in the citys main park, the Luneta.Plan es sweep down from the clouds to drop off their deadly bombs, wrote the college yearbook, men shoot, advance, fall . . . beneath the smoke the unseen drama of war with its horrors and victories. As male cadets littered Lunetas smoking battlefield, the Nurses Corps recruited from the ranks of the Sponsors rush to the field to give aid to the wounded and the dying. Among these all-male cadets, appeal to women, the defining opposite within this dimorphism, was deemed an essential attribute of future military leadership. The girls go for him in a big way (very big way), said the 1937 UP yearbook of cadet Major Ferdinand Marcos, so much so that most of the time he has to set up up the sign Standing Room Only. Claims his heart is impregnable to feminine allure, and insists on calling guys who fall in love inebriated weaklings.Marcos himself internalized this gendered duality to write, after the war, of sacrificing his manhood to stage a feminized nation he calls Filipinas. We cursed ou rselves . . . for having given up our arms and with them our manhood. . ., Marcos wrote of their wartime surrender to Japan on Bataan. Filipinas had welcomed us in pain of the disgrace of our defeat in Bataan. But it seemed that although she had smiled at us through her tears, she would not bind up our wound. Harsh male initiation also became part of officer training at UP. Cadet Sergeant Macario Peralta, Jr., the future defense secretary, noted in the 1932 yearbook that the Corps had faced difficulties in breaking in the new cadets, but made sure that troublesome plebes receive sundry other polite attentions (Peralta 1932, 358). Peraltas yearbook biography, published two years later when he was cadet colonel, revealed the meaning of this euphemism. One year after the Colonel sprouted in the University campus, he commenced hazing the plebes and beasts with unrelenting inhumanity. He isstill at it (Philippinensian1934, 396).Commonwealth ArmyIn 1935, national defense suddenly became the most critical issue facing the Fhpino people. In Washgton, President Franklin Roosevelt approved the creation of the Philippine Commonwealth as an autonomous, transitional government with a ten-year timetable to full inde-pendence. Under the National Defense Act, President Quezon made mobilization his top priority and committed a quarter of the budget to building a national army that would, by independence in 1945, have 10,000 regular soldiers backed by reserves of 400,000. In April 1936, some 150,000 Filipino men registered for the countrys first draft and, nine months later, 40,000 reported for training. Within three years, over a million schoolboys were marching.I0 From its butt in 1935, the Commonwealth, through military mobilization, intensified this process of gender reconstruction-encouraging a reinforcing array of national symbols, militarized masculinity, and domestic roles.With only a decade to prepare for independence and the burden of defense, the Commonwealth trie d to fashion a masculinity that would sustain mass conscription. As it mobilized in the 1930s, the Philippines imported a Euro-American form of manhood along with the howitzer and the pursuit plane. To build popular support for a citizens army, the neophyte Philippine state deployed a gendered propaganda with men strong, women weak men the defenders, women the defended. retributive as the new nation was personified as the feminine Filipinas in currency and propaganda, so young men were conscripted to defend her and her defenseless womankind.The government, in this transition to independence, slullfully manipulated public rituals and symbols to make a polarized gender dimorphism central to a new national self-image. We do not have to read against the grain to tease gender out of the Philippine Army, as if from some recondite cultural text. The key actors+ezon, Army Headquarters, and the cadets themselves-were quite self-conscious in their use of such imagery. The impact of militariz ation upon gender roles was most evident at the Manila Carnival-a grand, pre-war festival celebrating the fecundity of the land and the glories of itspeople. Like other pre-Lenten festivals across the Hispanic world, Carnival was a mix of the sound and frivolous, of rejoicing and reflection. Located at the heart of Manila, the sprawling Carnival enclosure held elaborate displays of provincial products such as rope or coconut. The two-week whirl of spectacle, society, and sport culminated in the efflorescenceing of the queen and her court at an elaborate formal ball. With the Philippines on parade, elite actors gained a stage to project images of nation and society before a mass audience. Before conscription, the queens coronation had been a lavish, highsociety affair-with eligible bachelors as escorts, whimsical Roman orEgyptian themes, and matching costumes for court and consorts. Since the citys elites selected the carnival queen by jury or press ballots, winners were women of wealth, prestige, and intellect. At the 1922 Carnival, for example, Queen Virginia Llamas was escorted by her future husband Carlos P. Romulo, later president of the UN General Assembly.The queens consort at the 1923 Carnival was Eugenio Lopez, later the countys most powerful entrepreneur, just as 1931 queen was Maria Kalaw, the future Philippine senator and UN delegate (Nuyda 1980, 1920, 1922,1931). With the launching of the Commonwealths army only months away, the 1935 Carnival saw revelry and whimsy giving way to military symbolism and a serious debate about gender roles. To accornmodate its greatly expanded display, the US Army occupied an entire section of the Manila Carnival ground for 400 linear feet of military exhibits and a replica of a World War I trench warfare complex (Tribune, 3,9 February 1935).The cadets of Manilas universities were recognise with a large military parade, treated to guided tours of the military exhibit, and featured as the queens escorts. In this m artial spirit, gender was on the march. At her coronation ceremony, the Constabulary band played a march while Queen Conchita I-walked between two files of University of the Philippines cadets with drawn sabers to a throne where the US governor General placed a crown of diamonds on her head and the admiring throng applauds (Tribune, 16, 21, 22 February 1935). On their night in this Carnival Auditorium, Far Eastern University students staged aspectacular revue called Daughters of Bathala, with males forming an outer, protective circle while women in gowns whirled about in a grand finale . . . symbolizing the types of modern Filipino women from the suffragettes and debutantes to the thrill-girls of the cabarets and the boulevards (Tribune, 3 March 1945).Instead of the usual frivolous rhetoric about feminine beauty, the 1935 Carnival launched a national debate on womens rights. harangue before the convention of the Federation of Womens Clubs, Senate President Quezon announced that th e Constitutional Convention had just approved compulsory military service. He urged the nations women to assume the duty to mould the character of . . . youth that we may build up here a citizenry of virile manhood capable of shouldering the burdens of our future independent existence. And how was such a radical social reconstruction to be accomplished? Men would be called away for training in patriotism, but women,Quezon said, should hindrance home to bring up upstanding, courageous and patriotic youngsters. Instead of being lulled by the sentimental glow of his oratory, the Federations president, Mrs. Pilar H. Lim, the wife of General Vicente Lim (USMA 14), confronted Quezon, demanding that he redress the injustice done . . . through the failure of the constitutional convention to insert a provision . . . granting the women . . . the right to vote.Quezon assured Mrs. Lim that he has forever been in favor of granting this right to women. Indeed, two years later, under his preside ncy and through Mrs. Lims leadership, a plebiscite on womens suffrage passed by an overwhelming margin. Over the next three years as mobilization intensified, each carnival accentuated the military symbolism and its supporting gender dimorphism. When President Quezon opened the sublime gateway to the 1936 Carnival city, a full battalion of Philippine Army troops formed an honor guard while he severed the ribbons with a specially-made native sword.In its Carnival coverage, the Sunday Tribune Magazine juxtaposed photo-essays of the military review (the steel helmets of the U.P. cadets glaring in the afternoon sun) and the 1936 Fashion follow-up (models resplendent in shining silver and satin.) For their night at the Carnival, the UP studentspresented a richly engendered historical pageant, written by Dr. Carlos P. Romulo, featuring a cast of one thousand students (including seven hundred girls) and starring a woman student as Filipinas, the feminized symbol of the nation (Tribune, 1 5 February, 1 March 1936).Theme After the establishment of the Republic, the nation will meet with difficulties and dangers, but it will overcome them all and thereby become stronger . . . Book of Time Revealed. Spirit of History ascends the stage from stage right and writes Commonwealth. 111. Trumpets. Filipinas enters from stage left followed by people, including agencies, soldiers, dancers . . . IV. Spirit of Prophecy ascends from stage left . . . and . . . writes Republic. V. People cheer, bells ring, salute of guns . . . VIII. Invasion-all to arms. Battle. XI. Mourning dance. Filipina rises from the center of the floor, flag over her. National hymn is sung by all. I. 11.Despite such military inroads, the coronation of Queen Mercedes I featured the usual fantasy numbers such as Parisian Lace and the exotic South Sea Wastes. Her escorts were still society bachelors in white-tie and tails. A year later, the military symbolism was triumphant. At the 1937 Carnival, the queens escort s were now uniformed ROTC cadets. The queen now became Miss Philippines and her coronation, as its libretto indicates, was a martial drama of male soldiers rising to her defense as the engendered symbol of the nation.Scene I Triumphal entrance of the Army of Miss Philippines, sovereign of our cultural and economic progress, composed of officers and soldiers who will stage a military exhibition. Scene I1 Entrance of the wash up and Bugle Corps which will go through some military evolutions. Scene 1 1 1 The Drum and Bugle Corps will announce the arrival of Miss Philippines and her Court of Honor . . . Miss Philippines will be preceded by a group of pages carrying the crown and other presents, and another group of pages carrying her train . . . Scene IV The Drum and Bugle Corps announces that all is ready for the coronation of Miss Philippines. Scene V Ceremonies of the coronation of MissPhilippines, placing of the crown by His Honor, The Mayor of Manila . . . Scene VI Gun salute to M iss Philippines by her Army. Entrance of Foreign Envoys-Royal offering, etc. Scene VII Military evolutions by the Army of Miss Philippines and the Drum and Bugle Corps.Beyond the ballroom, the Carnivals sporting contests and the ROTC drill competitions proliferated in celebration of a physical, martial masculinity. Before a crowd of 40,000, for example, the Schools Parade featured girls in gowns riding on flower-covered floats while high school boys stepped past in uniforms and snappy marching that thrilled the watching t h o s a n d s . By the 1938 Carnival, the military parade had been transformed from a procession of students in their toy-soldier uniforms into an awesome spectacle of military might. With thousands of spectators packed along the boulevards, armed columns of Philippine Army, Philippine Scouts, and college cadets tramped past the Legislative Building as tight formations of bombers and pursuit planes roared overhead (Tribune, 15, 16 February 1938). After its esta blishment in 1936, the Philippine Army deployed a similar dualism to build support for conscription among a people without a tradition of military service. As the date for draft registration approached, the Commonwealth plastered public spaces with recruiting posters.One depicted a noble Filipina, neckline cut low and bare arms outstretched for the embrace, calling on Young Men to Heed Your Countrys Call Another asked, Which Would You alternatively Be . . . this or that?-and then showed a snappy soldier smiling at two admiring women while a civilian male skulks in the rear, hands in pockets-a universal sipifier.I4 Then, at 830 A.M. on 15 May 1936, each provincial governor supervised an elaborate ritual to select the first conscripts for basic training. Before the public, the governor, flanked by military guards, placed the registration cards for all twenty-year old men in two large jars. 2 young ladies, not over ogdoadeen years of age, shall . . . make the drawing, read the Phil ippine Army regulations. These young ladies shall be blind-folded and shall weardresses with short sleeves-not reaching beyond elbow (Commonwealth, Bulletin No. 17 Meixsel 1993, 301).So strong was the appeal of military training that four of the countrys leading legislators, including presidential wishful Manuel Roxas, volunteered for the first Reserve Officers Service School (ROSS) in mid-1936. In this commencement address to this distinguish in September, President Quezon explained that officers were to serve as the nations models for patriotism and new, virile form of citizenry (The Bayonet 1936, 94, 98). The good officer. . . , wherever he is, . . . spreads the doctrine of loyalty, of respect for law and order, of patriotism, of self-discipline and education, and of national preparation to defend our country. . . . Our whole nation will become more firmly solidified, more virile, more unselfishly devoted to promotion of the general welfare, as our officer corps grows in qualit y and strength, and the results of its efforts permeate to the remotest hamlet of our country.Philippine Military AcademyForming such an officer corps was the most difficult part of this mobilization. As Quezon put it, the heart of an army is its officers. Along with buying rifles and building camps, the creation of this army required, as the president was well aware, the construction of officers as exemplars for a new image of the Filipino as warrior. To form such leaders, the Defense Act provided for the establishment of a Philippine Military Academy at Baguio for the education of career officers. This academy was, in the words of the Commonwealths vice-president, the foundation stone of the entire military establishment, providing the leadership necessary to knit together a scattered and mostly connected citizen army into one whole, living, pulsating, homogenous machine that can fight with courage (Scribe 50 Osmefia 7-8, 10).In establishing his new academy, Quezon, through his military advisers Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, chose the US Military Academy at West Point as its model. Transporting the West Point system, with all of its peculiarities, from the bluffs of the Hudson to the mountains of Baguio entailed cultural adaptation. From the perspective of the PMA staff, the new academy would socialize the cadets through its formalcurriculum and a four-year progression from neophyte to command. To succeed, however, these formal processes rested upon rituals and symbols that would make the academys abstractions meaningful to teen-aged Filipinos. Drawing upon the countrys culture of masculinity, cadets used rituals of male initiation and group solidarity to reinforce the PMAs institutional imperatives.Through a fusion of the West Point curriculum, faithfully reproduced by the PMAs staff, and loose innovations by these Filipino cadets, an American academy became a viable model for a Philippine institution (Love11 1955, 316-21 Wamsley 1972, 399-41 7). To ensure that its cadets would be archetypes of masculine beauty, the academy barred applicants with any deformity which is repulsive or any who suffered from extreme ugliness. Medical examiners had to insure, moreover, that an applicants face was free from any lack of symmetrical development or unsightly deformities such as large birthmarks, large hairy moles, . . . mutilations due to injuries or surgical operation (Commonwealth of the Philippines 1937). To mould these exemplary males, the PMA became a sum up institution that would, like West Point, leave a lasting impress upon everygraduate (Janowitz 138 Goffman 1961).The PMAs 1938 yearbook thus described the Tactical Department and its drill instructors as a veritable forging shop in which the raw and crude materials are . . . purified of their undesirable qualities. In their song P.M.A. Forever, cadets celebrated their academys capacity to make men (Sword 1938, 46-48, 104). Within the walls of old and glorious P.M.A. The yre molded to the real men that they should beMen who can face the bitter realities of life With courage even in the midst of bloody strife. As centerpiece in the nations gender reconstruction, the PMA indoctrinated its Filipino cadets into a Euro-American ideal of military manhood. With its alien curriculum, the PMA, more than any Philippine institution of its era, aspired to a cultural transformation, a remalung of its cadets on a European model of mascuhity. The academy made its imprint through a program of moral formation through body movement, incessant supervision, and formal indoctrination.In its own words, the PMA taught soldierly movements to inculcate prompt obedience indaily marching knowledge of ballroom ethics with weekly waltz lessons and self-reliance, poise, initiative, judgment, enthusiasm, and discipline in gymnastics (Commonwealth 1938,1619). Filipino cadets reshaped imported values through their own culture of masculinity, malung hazing the PMAs central rite of p assage-from civilian to soldier, from plebe to cadet. Entering plebes arrived at the academy from communities with their own rituals of male initiation and expectations for manhood (Rosaldo 1980, 35-37). In many lowland villages of the 1930s, adolescent males passed through an initiation, such as circumcision, and had elaborate codes for masculine friendship epitomized in peer groups called barkada.In the villages of Central Luzon, for example, Tagalog males who joined moving in unions during this decade were tested in an elaborate midnight ritual that branded each on the upper arm with a poker plucked white-hot from a raging bonfire (Fegan 1995 See also Blanc-Szanton 1990, 350). Growing up in such poor communities, many future members of PMAs Class of 1940, the first products of this new school, were familiar with these masculine rites of testing and bonding. One classmate, Francisco del Castillo, recalled in his autobiography for the classs 50th reunion grand Book, that he often missed class in high school to join youth who did nothing but form gangs to fight other gangs for su-premacy in the municipality of Vigan.In a later interview, he added that his reputation as a local champion in ritualized knife fights, attacking with the right hand and defending with a towel wrapped tightly about the left, made him the leader of the towns west-side gang. Asked if his gang practiced any sort of initiation, del Castillo replied that you let him do a certain errand and see how undaunted he is (Mendoza 1986, 178 del Castillo 1995). For PMA cadets, hazing and the broader experience of plebe initiation served as a transformative traumacoloring the subsequent academy experience for individuals and uniting a new class through shared suffering. During their first months, plebes were subjected to an unbroken regimen of running, recitations, and drill under nameless, powerful upperclassmen.Arriving during summer recess when the main activity was their initiation,incoming pl ebes faced the harsh, unshakable attentions of the second-year cadets, or yearlings-still aching from their own humiliations that had ended only weeks before. After the initial beast barracks, the hazing subsided into a constant, low-level harassment that continued for another eight months until the upperclass recognized them as full members of the Corps. Surviving this abuse left cadets with a strong sense of personal pride and class identity. Writing in the Golden Book, Class 40s Cesar Montemayor recalled their plebe year as a one-year initiation period full of rites, rules and requirements that instilled desirable manly and military qualities (Batch 36 Golden Book, 110-11). In showing how the Commonwealth constructed a new masculinity at the PMA, we cannot ignore the impact that this mobilization and its propaganda had upon the whole order of gender roles in an emerging nation (Morgan 1994, 169-70).Despite its isolation in the mountains of Baguio, the PMAs training of these youn g males had lasting implications for the whole of Philippine society. The school served, in effect, as a social laboratory, a crucible for casting a new form of Filipino masculinity. Through hazing, study, and drill, the academy pounded young males into a foreign mold of military manhood. By parading before the masses in Manila and acting in Tagalog films, these prewar PMA cadets projected this image of masculinity into an emerging national consciousness. Only a year after the PMA opened, a Manila film crew shot a two-reel documentary, titled The West Point of the Philippines, which, the cadet yearbook reported, was now being featured at the Ideal Theatre and was taking Manila by storm.